The Fantasy Fan, Volume 2, Number 2, October 1934

A portal to 1934, when the weird fiction community was small, passionate, and just beginning to call itself a community. This issue of The Fantasy Fan captures the genre at a turning point, before Tolkien, before Lovecraft became a name, when fans and writers were still drafting the blueprints for modern fantasy and horror. Edited by eighteen-year-old Charles D. Hornig (a prodigy by any measure), the magazine pulses with the energy of enthusiasts writing for enthusiasts. Here you'll find short stories that linger in shadow, essays debating the craft, and poetry that speaks in strange tongues. The production is rough, the paper cheap, the ambitions grand. What emerges is a time capsule of a moment when the fantastic was still wild, still definitionless, still dangerous. For readers who want to understand where modern horror and fantasy came from, this is an artifact worth holding.